PubMed was first released two decades ago in January 1996 as an experimental database under the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) retrieval system. The word “experimental” was dropped from the website in April 1997, and on June 26, 1997, a Capitol Hill press conference officially announced free MEDLINE access via PubMed.More information, a brief history can be found here:

“Almost the number of stars in the Milky Way.” Through this stellar comparison, the National Institutes of Health proudly announced in 2005 that the content of their computerized collection of DNA sequences called GenBank had reached 50 billion bases or units of DNA. Today, it contains far more, over 200 billion bases from over 350,000 different species, making it one of the largest scientific database in the world.

Here is the announcement of the availability of the Nirenberg papers: “GenBank & The Early Years of “Big Data”

Marshall Nirenberg in the lab in early 1960’s, when he completed the first summary document of the genetic code — how triplets (DNA sequences) direct amino acids to form proteins. Pictures of the group and more about the papers are here:

“Scopus has added 5 million pre-1996 articles and over 93 million references – and we’re not even half-way

Submitted by Pierre van Doorn

on Thu, 11/26/2015 – 16:06

As of this week, Scopus has added 5 million pre-1996 records including over 93 million references to the database. This has been done in two ways: by adding pre-1996 cited references to existing articles in Scopus and by adding article back files, including their cited references, coming from archives from various publishers, going back to 1970.

This milestone is the result of the ongoing Scopus Cited Reference Expansion Program initiated in March 2014 that aims to include cited references in Scopus going back to 1970 for pre-1996 content. The goal of this expansion program is to further enhance the ability for Scopus users to perform long-term, extensive bibliometric and historic trend analyses – and to enhance and further complete the h-index for researchers who published pre-1996.

Brand new concepts include: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Human Embryonic Stem Cells, Olive Oil, Origin of Life, Open Access Publishing, War-Related Injuries, RNAi Therapeutics, and many more terms. Medline thesaurus terms are remapped when changes occur, so as to include articles under former headings.

Effective January 1, 2016, ScienceDirect will no longer support Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

“We strongly encourage our customers to follow Microsoft’s directive as well by updating to more recent versions of IE. Additionally, users can move to the latest versions of the Chrome or Firefox browsers for an optimal ScienceDirect experience”

The whys:

Remove current IE8 security issues

Enhance existing security measures across all browsers

Add support for new browser technologies

Add responsive design to aid use of ScienceDirect across devices

Improve accessibility to better enable access to people with diverse abilities

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit the ScienceDirect BlogSource: Email today from Elsevier ScienceDirect <sciencedirect@mail.elsevier.com>

Poisonous Plants Database

The people in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University want to make sure that you don’t accidentally poison your livestock or pets with toxic plants. Their Poisonous Plants database includes a sizable number of entries such as oak trees (the acorns and young leaves are poisonous to horses and cattle), Daphne (toxic to cats, dogs, and humans), and rhubarb (the leaves are toxic to goats, swine, horses, and even people—who knew?). Each entry is accompanied by images of the plants, as well as answers to questions that the authors have either encountered in the past or anticipate that readers may have. The database is simple to browse—either by scientific name or common name—or users can search the database by scientific name, common name, primary poisons, or species most often affected.

“ProQuest is enabling the full text of its scholarly journal content to be indexed in Google Scholar, improving discovery and research outcomes. Our goal is that by the third quarter of 2015, users starting their research in Google Scholar will be able to access full text via ProQuest.”

ProQuest has marked another milestone in ease of access to its rich research content. The full text of its scholarly content – including journals and working papers – is now indexed in Google Scholar, enabling Google Scholar users to seamlessly discover and access their library’s ProQuest collections. Efficiency and productivity for both ProQuest and Google Scholar users is improved, while libraries benefit from increased usage for their subscribed collections.